


The Lost Weekend (of a lifetime)

by halfeatenmoon



Category: The Unbeatable Squirrel Girl
Genre: F/F, Friends to Lovers, Getting Together, Missing Scene, The Unbeatable Squirrel Girl Issue #31, Timey-Wimey
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2018-06-18
Updated: 2018-06-18
Packaged: 2019-05-17 05:58:30
Rating: Explicit
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 11,062
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/14826657
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/halfeatenmoon/pseuds/halfeatenmoon
Summary: Doreen and Nancy are trapped in hypertime. A weekend for the rest of the world will be a lifetime for Doreen and Nancy. Sometimes they try to get back to their old life. Sometimes they forget about it.(A more explicit take on Issue #31)





	The Lost Weekend (of a lifetime)

**Author's Note:**

  * For [weakinteraction](https://archiveofourown.org/users/weakinteraction/gifts).



> Issue #31 came out right when I got this assignment, and it came so close to canon Doreen/Nancy that I couldn't resist the chance to take it and push it over the edge to Make Them Kiss. However, I knew this was running the risk that maybe you weren't caught up on recent issues, so I've tried to keep it so that it makes sense even without having read the comic. I hope you enjoy. <3
> 
> Also, I want to give credit to celuran/apiary for being my sounding board on this, and being a wonderful go-to Squirrel Girl expert.

The first thing Nancy did when she and Doreen got stuck in hypertime was to try to figure out how fast they were really going.

Well, that was an exaggeration. First they found some crimes to stop, and Nancy replaced a whole lot of guns with bananas and dumped the guns in a river, and then they ran down the middle of the road by jumping on the roofs of cars like they were in an action movie. But after that, the first serious thing Nancy did was to work on the passage of time thing. It seemed like the logical thing to do. It wasn't as if she'd ever devised a plan for what to do when some weird villain who called himself EpicCrimez shot you with a ray gun that made you move at hundreds of times the usual speed of time, but doing the maths seemed like the next best step. After you'd done a bunch of the most fun things you can do when the rest of the world is frozen in time, anyway.

The problem was that calculating time was impossible when every clock in the world was hundreds of times slower than you were. Nancy had a tape measure, and plenty of things to use it on - running water, speeding bullets, trains in motion - but a key part of the equation was missing. She was on her third attempt, measuring the slow progress of a bullet at a shooring, when she threw down her tape measure and yelled "This is _impossible_."

Doreen was up a tree at the time; it was hard to break the habit of checking in with nearby squirrels, even when they were all still moving at normal time and couldn’t tell her anything. She dropped out as soon as she heard Nancy’s complaints, though, and walked over to check out the scene.

“There must be something we can use,” she said, at last. “Our bodies are the only things in hypertime, but they… do things. Regularly timed things.”

“I tried timing by my pulse, but pulse rates are too variable. So are breathing rates. We could track by hair growth or something, but that takes days.” She frowned. “I guess the best I can do is counting.”

“Counting what?”

“One cat-and-dog, two cat-and-dog, three cat-and-dog. If you say it out loud it works out to about a second. I think.” Nancy looked at the bullet, still crawling slowly through the air. “Of course, I don’t even know the speed of a standard bullet. The internet takes too long to be any use."

“I know, right?” Doreen sat down on the front of a nearby car and leaned back, cushioning herself on her tail. “As extremely cool as this whole experience is, I miss the internet. I keep checking my phone and it’s still on the same screen as… uh…” She frowned. “Without clocks I can’t even complain about how long the internet takes.”

Nancy sat down next to her. She sat straight up at first, but after a moment she relaxed back to lean on Doreen’s tail, too. “I guess we can find this stuff in the library. We can take books out for as long as we want and still return them on the same day.”

“And with our new hypertime powers we can stop any superpowered battles before they end up destroying the library, too.”

“Yeah, and maybe I can figure out another way to work out how fast we’re going.

“I think you’re onto something with the hair. Or maybe fingernails.”

“Yeah, but that’ll only tell us weeks, or months. I want to work out how fast we go through, like, a day.”

“Why?”

Nancy looked over at her. They were perched so close together that her chin brushed Doreen’s cheek, but she still had a perfect view of the way Doreen’s face was tipped up, eyes closed basking in the sun.

“What do you mean, why?” Nancy asked, after a moment.

“I mean, why’s it so important to figure out exactly how long a day is? Or how we’ll know?”

“I don’t know, I just want to know, you know? It’s not going to get dark for us here. It’s going to be daylight all the time. I want to know when it’s time to eat and sleep and do all the routine things.”

“But apart from eating and sleeping, we can’t do any of the routine things. We can’t go to class. It’s just you and me and the streets of New York here.”

Nancy took a slow breath in. Just you and me and New York. There was absolutely nothing about that idea that worried her; it was hard to think of anything better than having the freedom to do whatever she wanted, and spending it with Doreen. Except that total freedom was just a little bit scary.

“I like routine, I guess,” she said. “I like having a rhythm. It makes me feel safe.”

“Safe?”

“Yeah.”

Nancy felt just a bit too warm, even for being out in the sun. Even telling Doreen that she needed to feel safe felt like she’d said too much. But she did like routine, it did make her comfortable, and they’d need to be comfortable if they were going to be here for a while.

Doreen didn’t say anything more, just sat there with her hands folded ant here waist and her eyes closed, her face tipped up to the sun. Nancy closed her eyes, too. Sitting with Doreen like this might be as good as a routine for making her feel safe. The rest of the world didn’t matter. Time could be going at any weird speed it wanted and Nancy could still feel like she was right where she wanted to be and it was going to last forever.

“I wonder where Tippy Toe is.”

“Huh?”

“She didn’t come with us today. I didn’t ask why. I was going to find out later.”

“We’ll find her,” Nancy said, firmly. “I know there’s a lot of New York, but I know we’ll find her. And if we don’t, she’ll come back to the apartment eventually.”

“That could take years,” Doreen said.

“The hypertime effect might wear off.”

“Or it might not.”

“We’ll do something with the gun to fix it, then.” Nancy closed her hand over Doreen’s. “And we’ll find Tippy. No question.”

Doreen squeezed her hand. “You know what she’d say about the time?”

“What?”

“She’d say you don’t need a clock to tell you when to eat and when to sleep. Just the weather to tell you when to store nuts, and when to dig them up again.

Nancy considered it. “I guess if there’s no classes to go to, she might have a point.”

“So that’s what we’ll do. We can have routine without knowing how fast we’re going. We’ll eat when we’re hungry and sleep when we’re tired, and in between we’ll fight crimes and build a time machine. And we’ll… read a lot of books, I guess.” Doreen frowned. “I can’t believe I never planned what I’d do if I had unlimited time.”

“You could write a book.”

“You could write the complete adventures of Cat-Thor.”

“We’ll have to get some new hobbies if computers run too slow to do computer science."

“So that’s what we’ll do. We can have routine without knowing how fast we’re going. We’ll eat when we’re hungry and sleep when we’re tired, and in between we’ll fight crimes and build machines to get us back and, and, and read a lot of books, I guess.” Doreen frowned. “I can’t believe I never planned what to do if I had unlimited time before.”

“Back to nature in the middle of New York, huh?” Nancy mused. “Yeah, okay. I can live with that.”

Doreen grinned, a smile that warmed her whole face. “That’s how we’ll do this, Nancy Whitehead. You just have to get a little bit more squirrel.”

 

 

It was hard to get to sleep the first night, because it wasn’t night. It was all very well to say they were going to do what they wanted when they felt like it, but that was more of a challenge when the sun didn’t set. They were roaming the streets until well past when they’d usually sleep, and didn’t notice they were tired until they both started snapping at each other. By the time they got back to the apartment, they were too exhausted to do more than eat some cold food out of the fridge and slink off to their bedrooms.

Where Nancy couldn’t sleep.

She closed her eyes and piled on more blankets, even though it was warm, trying to find something to trick her body into sleeping. But there was sun streaming through the windows and her mind kept circling around and around, veering from I saved people. We both saved people. I’m a superhero now too, all around to We’re stuck here, and what if we never get back?

No school, no work and non-stop superheroism didn’t seem so great when she couldn’t sleep and didn’t know when it would end. Even if she got to do it with Doreen.

After a while she threw all the covers off in a fit of spite and took to pacing around the apartment instead, like maybe she could wear herself out. The sunlight seemed to taunt her, forbidding her to sleep, and the dead silence of the world frozen still was a different kind of taunting. So much quiet, and still no peace.

The silence amplified the sound of her own breath, too, and she swore she could almost hear her heartbeat. They had an old analogue clock on the wall which would irritate her, too, if the second hand didn’t take such a long time between ticks. Even with such clear hearing in the silence, though, she only noticed Doreen’s footsteps a few seconds before she flung the door open.

“I’m sorry,” Nancy said, instantly. “I just couldn’t sleep.”

Doreen blinked at her. She looked as exhausted as Nancy felt, too tired to be cranky any more, just struggling to process what Nancy was saying.

“I can’t sleep either,” she said, at last, and wordlessly tugged Nancy into the bedroom with her, where they both collapsed on the bed.

They didn’t do this, normally. Sometimes they sat on each other’s beds and watched movies on their laptops, like they were still teenagers having a sleepover, but they didn’t sleep together. But here was Nancy lying flat on Doreen’s bed in a nest of blankets, with Doreen climbing half on top of her to nestle her face against Nancy’s shoulder. Everything was soft and warm and it smelled like Doreen everywhere she turned, the smell of shampoo and nuts and fur.

“This doesn’t seem so cool any more,” Doreen said, her voice muffled.

“It’ll be okay in the morning, I think. We’ll have better ideas then.”

“How do we know it’s morning if we never sleep? How do I sleep if it never gets dark?” Doreen sighed. “What if I’m doomed to be awake forever until I go mad and we never get back to our own time.

In Nancy’s defense, she was tired, too, and just as desperate to get to sleep. That’s why she didn’t think before she opened her mouth and said “Let me blindfold you.”

It wasn’t the slight reddening of Doreen’s face that gave her away, so much as the prickling fur and the way her tail suddenly started lashing. As her mind worked frantically to backtrack, Nancy noted that that would be a very interesting reaction if it weren’t so mortifying.

“I just mean, uh, that could help! Blindfolds could help! Not that, uh, I don’t have to put it on you.” Nancy’s whole body had gone stiff with tension, and Doreen was still on top of her. “Should I leave? Maybe I should leave.”

Doreen laughed, awkwardly, but she didn’t move. She squeezed Nancy tighter, in fact. “No, don’t go. Uh, it’s fine. Not a bad idea. Maybe we can get some sleep masks tomorrow, huh?”

Nancy breathed out slowly. “And some blackout curtains, maybe.”

“Yeah, that would be good.” Doreen sighed and rubbed her face against Nancy’s pajama shirt. “I don’t want to drag you into bed every night, but it’s helping, I think. Can you stay for now?”

Nancy finally wrapped her arms around Doreen and hugged her, gently. She would stay with Doreen for as long as Doreen would have her. Tonight, the next night… who else was she going to spend the night with, when they were stuck here indefinitely? But for now she just said “Sure, I’ll stay,” and held onto Doreen as she finally drifted into an uneasy sleep.

 

 

It took them a week to find Tippy Toe. About a week, anyway - they’d slept six times before they found her. Doreen had tried to stay chipper, but Nancy could see her getting more and more agitated as time went by. It turned out to be much harder to find a specific squirrel when they couldn’t ask any other squirrels if they’d seen her. They just kept roaming around, stopping accidents where they could and checking every tree along the way.

Nancy got it. She was lucky that Mew didn’t leave the apartment; she could pet him all she wanted, even if it felt weird that he didn’t respond. She wondered how it felt for him, only ever getting pets for a fraction of a second at a time. She hoped it wasn’t too freaky. She didn’t plan to stop.

They found Tippy Toe with a group of other squirrels in Central Park. Nancy stayed on the ground as they walked, while Doreen leapt from tree to tree. It made it harder to talk, but they still never stopped talking, not until Doreen’s words trailed off and Nancy realised she was a couple of trees behind her.

Doreen?”

There was a pause, and then Doreen’s head poked out of the foliage, only a little bit ruffled. Her face, though, was strangely blank, like Doreen was closed off. “I found her.”

“Are you okay?”

Doreen nodded, once. “I’ll be down soon. I just… I need to talk to her, even if she can’t hear.”

“I’ll be here.”

Nancy could wait. She’d brought a book. She wasn’t sure why she was still reading it, though. It was kind of boring. She had all the time in the world to read, but even if your weekend was going to last forever, it was still no reason to keep reading bad books.

Especially since she kept getting distracted, listening in on Doreen’s chittering bits of it drifted down on the wind. Sad, and excited, and disappointed. Nancy could understand most of it now, but as she went on, Doreen’s voice got softer and softer, until Nancy could barely hear her. She’d almost fallen asleep when Doreen finally climbed down the trunk to sit beside her, and put her head on Nancy’s shoulder.

Nancy closed her book, but apart from that she didn’t move. “How is she?”

“Good. I guess? I don’t know. She’s with her friends, so I assume she’s good. She couldn’t hear anything I said.”

“You had a lot to say.”

“She’s my best squirrel friend, I had to tell her… you know, just stuff. It’s weird not telling her, even if she can’t hear.”

“You can write her a note, like we do for the others.”

“Yeah.” There was a hitch in her breath. “It’s just so weird. I’ve known Tippy since I was in middle school. I’ve done everything with her. She… I mean, you’re great, I just, there’s so much that I tell her. I’m going to miss her, even if we can do notes, and being someone’s only friend is a lot, I know that, and I don’t want you to get sick of me…”

Nancy could listen to Doreen talk for hours, but she couldn’t listen to this. She shushed her and pulled her close until she buried her face in Nancy’s sweater.

“It’s a heavy responsibility,” Nancy said, solemnly, “But I think I can manage being your only best friend as well as your human best friend for a while.”

Doreen sniffled into her shoulder. “I don’t know. I’m… I mean, you like being on your own, and I talk a lot.”

Doreen did talk a lot, that much was true. Nancy wasn’t so sure about being on her own any more, though. She never used to like having people around, and she hadn’t believed everything people had told her about how it would be different in college, where you could find the right sort of people. She hadn’t counted on meeting Doreen.

“I know this is different, because I only had one best friend to begin with. And because Mew is still in our apartment. But if I had to pick one person to spend the rest of my life with, it would be you.”

It was so close to a confession that Nancy felt a stab of fear that maybe it was, maybe she’d said too much. But Doreen just sniffed, and kept hugging her, and Nancy felt so bold and so weak at having said something so mushy that she went and pressed a kiss to the top of her head.

“Okay,” Doreen said, with a sigh, and finally let go of Nancy to wipe her face. “Okay. It might be hard to pick a favourite person, but you’re right at the top of my list. Just promise me that if you get sick of me, or if you just need some space or anything, you’re going to tell me.”

“Doreen, have you ever known me to not say exactly what I’m thinking?”

“Well, you’ve never told me to leave you alone before.”

Nancy stared at her, trying to convey that’s because I don’t want you to leave me alone, you idiot with her eyes.

“Oh, right.” Doreen said, sheepishly. “See, this is why you’re my best human friend. I know I can trust you to be honest and not be a jerk about it.”

Nancy felt a prickle at the back of her neck. It wasn’t that she was lying. She wasn’t even hiding anything. Being Doreen’s best friend was all she wanted, and she was perfectly happy. She just didn’t see the need to tell Doreen, who liked boys, that sometimes she thought about kissing her. Nancy had a plan: enjoying the years she had to live with Doreen and being the most supportive friend in the world when Doreen found a boyfriend who would actually stick around. It was a good plan. She was excited about it. She hadn’t thought about what it would be like if the living-with-Doreen part could last for longer. If neither of them had the opportunity to meet boys any more. If maybe this part could last forever.

They had to find a way to get back.

She cleared her throat. “I’ll do my best. As long as you tell me if you need space, too. Or even if human company isn’t cutting it and you just need to go hang out with some squirrels.”

“I don’t know if hanging out with squirrels who are frozen in time would really help much if I need company,” said Doreen, but at least she was smiling now.

“We’ll steal a fur coat and make me a suit and you can pretend I’m a giant squirrel,” Nancy said, after a while, and then there were tears in Doreen’s eyes from laughing, too.

 

 

“What are you doing?”

Nancy was, in fact, holding a tape measure to another yet another speeding bullet.

“The usual. Checking out how far it's gone since this morning.”

“But we worked out our rough speed, didn't we? Although I guess growing our fingernails out so we can measure them is a bit annoying.”

“Sure.” Nancy retracted the tape measure and paused while she thought about how to explain it. “I mean, the fingernails tell us a lot. But I wanted something with a little more detail, so I can see whether the difference between our time and the rest of the world's time is changing at all.”

“And?”

“It’s not.”

“Huh.”

“I thought the effect might wear off. I hoped it would, anyway. A lot of super-things do, right? The Hulk goes back to being Bruce, Doctor Strange’s spells wear off. Even Doombots probably break down if you leave them long enough without maintenance. But time’s still travelling the way it always has, and we’re getting older, and we’re still here.”

Doreen chewed her lip. “I hadn’t really thought about it, but that’s kind of annoying.”

Nancy agreed. It was annoying. But her problem was more that she had to make a conscious effort not to stare at Doreen’s chewed-up lower lip and resist the urge to get up and stop her, run her fingers over Doreen’s lips to soothe them instead. Or maybe get her some lip gloss. Or just get up and kiss her, already.

“I mean, there are some positives,” Nancy said, tearing her eyes away. “Don’t get me wrong, I love being an equal crime fighting partner with you. It’s cool to get to feel like I’m just as much of a superhero as you are.”

“Um, excuse you,” Doreen said, with a mock frown. “You were always super, Nancy!”

“Well, in that case, may as well go back to the normal world, right?” Nancy said, with a crooked grin. Get back to the normal world, get back to being around other people, and stop being around Doreen all the time and wanting to kiss her.

Or she could stay here, with nobody else around, and have Doreen all to herself.

Doreen was tapping her feet. “This sounds like a maths problem. Stay in hypertime and rescue a higher percentage of people, or go back to normal time and save people for a longer span of time.”

“Stay here and keep enjoying everything free, and not go back to class.”

“Or normal time, where we don’t have to steal and I can actually use computers.” Doreen smiled. “Plus, I guess I would like to talk to our friends again. I mean, with words and facial expressions and not just with notes.”

“Yeah, me too.” Nancy felt a pang of jealousy about Doreen wanting to talk to other people, but she pushed it down. She missed them, too.

“Do you really think we can do it, though?” Doreen asked.

“We still have EpicCrimez’ ray gun. I confiscated it back on the first day.”

“Oh, neat! So we can reverse it, you think?”

“Well, not right now. If I knew how to do that, I would have done it right away.” She paused. “Well, a couple of weeks ago, anyway. Once we’d saved everyone and had a picnic on top of a train and swung on ropes from the museum rafters.”

There was an odd look in Doreen’s eyes. “With two computer science geniuses at work, we can probably figure it out. And it’s not like we have to use it right away…”

Doreen grinned, and Nancy grinned back at her. It was good when they were on the same page. It was the kind of thing that made her like being here with Doreen enough to stay, and not worry about what would happen if they were here for years. It was almost enough to get out of her head and just tell Doreen that she loved her.

Not quite, though. Not when she didn’t know how long it would be before they got back. If they were going to stay the only two people who could talk to each other, she didn’t want it to get awkward.

 

 

It may have been a small miracle that it hadn’t gotten awkward already. Or maybe Doreen and Nancy were just really, really good friends.

 

 

While part of the fun of this was doing everything together, they did wind up specializing. Saving people was Doreen’s specialty, even if their super speed meant Nancy could do a lot of rescuing, too. She could do a hell of a lot - she could stop car accidents, pluck bullets out of mid-air, and occasionally redistribute some cash to people who needed it the most without getting caught. But she still couldn’t leap through the air the way Doreen did, so saving lives was still more Doreen’s specialty than Nancy’s.

The time machine, though, quickly became Nancy’s baby. It wasn’t that Doreen didn’t try to help; she was just as enthusiastic at first. But while neither of them had really tried mechanics before, Doreen found the metal and grease and tools a bit of a chore, while Nancy loved it. Some days, she lost a whole afternoon tinkering with pieces of it - not that losing track of time meant very much, except occasionally forgetting to eat. But Doreen was always there with a sandwich, or sometimes a hot drink that she’d made by painstakingly waiting for some water to boil the old fashioned way.

“You know, if you ever want to take a break from making a time machine, you could try and invent something that boils water super fast,” Doreen suggested one day, as she handed Nancy a cup of coffee.

Nancy made a token effort at wiping the grease off her hands - it didn’t help very much - before she took up the cup.

“Okay. Oh, Doreen, this is so good.” It wasn’t the best coffee ever, but it was definitely, like, the best coffee she’d had in six months.

“I’d make you more coffee if it didn’t take all day to boil water,” Doreen, said with a smile.

Nancy took another sip and drummed her fingers on the table. “I could do something with pressurizing it, I suppose. The problem is that pressurized things are much more prone to exploding.”

“No problem!” Doreen grinned. “That just means we have to test it in Tony’s lab. I figured out how to break into it when you needed that doohicky the other day.”

Nancy loved their new routine. It was the kind of domestic life she never dared to dream of before. In the mornings, they roamed New York solving people’s problems. In the afternoon, Nancy got up to her elbows in circuits and grease while Doreen read science books or stole more parts for her, or made her coffee. Then they’d both pile onto the sofa in the evening, legs and tails tangled up, and read until they fell asleep. She couldn’t imagine anything better.

 _Liar,_ she thought to herself, as she drank the rest of her coffee. _It would be better if you were really lovers instead of just living like life partners because there’s nobody else around._

 

 

Several days later, Nancy decided the other thing that might possibly make this better is if she could make any progress at all.

When Nancy hit the wall, she was tinkering with the machine and humming to herself. It had been weird going for something like six months without hearing any music - no matter how they tried, sounds were just too slow in hypertime for them to really hear anything. But Nancy knew enough songs to keep herself entertained.

She’d spent days puzzling over one of the components in the original ray gun. She was honestly starting to wonder whether it was impossible to figure out during hypertime, like maybe the machine itself still had to run at normal speed, which meant even if she fixed it, it would take days in their time to run a test. But yesterday she’d thought she might be figuring it out, and she’d been working at the problem ever since, she stopped singing with a satisfied “ha!” as a piece fell into place, and then she turned the gun on.

Nothing.

“How’s it going?”

Nancy shrugged. “I thought I’d figured out this new component, but it’s just the same as always. No movement.”

Doreen made a sympathetic noise. “That sucks.”

“It might be the time thing. I’m going to set it up to fire at that pot plant we bought the other day, the one I hit with the original ray gun.”

Doreen raised an eyebrow.

“Sorry, the pot plant we _borrowed_ the other day.”

“I guess that’s… closer to accurate.”

Nancy shrugged; that part was beside the point. “If it works, we’ll just give everything back before we send ourselves back to regular time. It’ll be fine.” She stood up and brushed down her overalls. “I don’t think we’re anywhere close yet, though. That one must have been a dead end.”

“That really sucks. But I got you some cake, if you want?”

Nancy thought about it as she sat across from Doreen at the table and nibbled at the cake. Normally it would be pretty maddening to keep working at a problem like that only to hit a dead end. It happened all the time in programming, so they were both used to it, but that didn’t stop it from being hard. Despite the difficulty of the problem, though, Nancy didn’t feel that bothered by it. There was no rush. They had a lot of time. And as she looked at Doreen, smiling at her with her cheeks full of cake, it was impossible to feel like she was in that much of a hurry.

She wasn’t going to not try to fix this. She liked solving problems too much not to solve it; if they fixed it before she was ready to go back, she could always say “Hey, Squirrel Girl, I’m not done having fun yet - let’s stick around and save more people!”

She probably didn’t need to mention how much she liked being alone with Doreen and nobody else in the world, though. Until she met Doreen, Nancy didn’t think there was anyone in the world she liked enough to spend all her time with. She never thought it was last forever - Doreen would meet a guy she liked some day, and they’d settle down together, and then Nancy would see her on weekends sometimes. She’d support Doreen in anything she wanted to do, including having a relationship and pulling away from this together-forever thing they had going on.

“What are you thinking about?” Doreen asked, interrupting her thoughts. “You thought of something else do pull with the machine?”

“No,” Nancy said, smiling. “Just thinking about how glad I am that I’m doing this with you.”

“You too, Nancy Whitehead. We’ve still got to find you a superhero name,” Doreen said, with a warm grin.

And this, this right here was all she ever wanted. Nancy didn’t even need a superhero name when she had Doreen saying her name with that smile.

Which is when Doreen flushed, suddenly, and coughed, and turned back into the kitchen.

“Doreen? You okay?”

“Fine.” She was staring blankly into the fridge.

“Doreen, we haven’t had food in there for months, not since we hauled that whole Tony’s Own Fully Automated Mobile Grocery Store to the lobby.”

The back of her neck was red. “I just have feelings sometimes, okay?”

“Okay. You want to talk about them?”

“No.” Doreen paced towards the living room, and then paced back. “I just worry that you’ll get sick of me.”

“I know. But I won’t.”

“How can you be so sure?”

Nancy felt a prickle at the back of her neck. “I know. I just won’t.”

“I know you’re working as hard as you can, and I’m working too, and I love everything you’re doing, but it freaks me out that we haven’t gotten anywhere. We might never talk to anyone else again. We could die here! Doesn’t that scare you?”

Nancy’s chest felt tight, watching Doreen so agitated. She hated this. “Doreen, that sucks. I wish I could make it better, but I’m going to keep trying.”

Doreen stopped. “But it doesn’t scare you?”

“Well… no, not really. I mean I want to get back, but I wouldn’t say I’m scared.”

“Doesn’t it suck that you won’t talk to anyone else? Or date anyone else?”

“Not enough to get scared.” She looked away, uncomfortable with this new turn. She wanted to drop it, but she also wanted Doreen to stop looking so stricken, and she found she just couldn’t stop talking. “Have you ever seen me on a date? We’ve lived together for three years and I’ve never been out with someone.”

“So you don’t feel like you’re missing out?”

“I miss my mom, sure. I miss my friends. The notes help, but it’s not the same. But really, this is okay. I _like_ our life here.”

“Okay, well, if you don’t mind being stuck here with me, and you actually really like it, and you don’t… uh.” Doreen started pacing again. Nancy felt cold all over, a full-body chill. That wasn’t the answer Doreen wanted, obviously, and Nancy thought she could see why. She just didn’t like it. She hadn’t thought about what would happen if Doreen got sick of being around with her.

“Whatever it is, you can tell me,” she said, softly.

“You’re not going to hate me?”

“I can’t promise anything without knowing what it is. I mean if you’re about to tell me that this is all a plot you cooked up with Doctor Doom to keep me captive forever, I’m going to be mad.”

Doreen chewed her lip. “It’s not that.”

“Okay. Well, you’re my favourite person in the world and most of the time, I really like being here with you. I mean, it’s kind of my dream, if I’m honest.” There was that flutter again, that nervousness bouncing around her chest, and she hugged her arms to her body to try to keep it in. “I’m just saying, there’s almost nothing you could say that would make me hate you. I think we’re good.”

“Okay.” Doreen walked in a circle again, then looked Nancy in the eye, then looked down, and muttered “IthinkIlikeyoulikeLIKElikeyouandisitokayifwekiss”

Nancy’s brain screeched to a halt, replaying the words without taking any of it in. That couldn’t be right.

“What?”

Doreen threw her hands over her face, covering a deep blush “Oh my god, I knew it, you hate me and now this is going to be weird and awkward for all eternity, I never should have…”

“Hey.” Nancy stood up and took Doreen’s hands, and pulled them away from her face. They stared at each other in dead silence for a few moments, Doreen looking mortified and Nancy’s mind still whirling frantically, trying to figure out what to do. Then her brain finally gave up on finding any words that made sense, and she just went right ahead and kissed her.

She wondered if time could get longer than it already was. Or frozen. Maybe time was frozen. That was what it was like kissing Doreen, because it was super good, and Doreen seemed to be frozen against her, and it was like the best and most terrifying thing Nancy had ever done, including all the times she’d held onto Doreen while she jumped off buildings.

Until Doreen kissed her back, and that was like jumping off buildings after she’d gotten used to it and learned to love it, because of the rush but because of holding onto Doreen as well, just like she was doing right now, grabbing at her hair and her waist and any bit of her that she could reach because she’d waited so long for this and nothing was enough.

When they stopped, Nancy wouldn’t let go of her, and Doreen made no move to step away. She just pulled her head back far enough that she could meet Nancy’s eyes, still close enough that Nancy could feel Doreen’s breath on her lips, and said “Nancy, what?”

“Hey, you said you wanted to kiss me.”

“Yeah, to get it off my chest!” Doreen’s hand fumbled around and caught Nancy’s fingers in hers. “I thought I’d clear the air, since we were stuck here together. I thought I’d just say it so we could get the awkwardness out of the way and I could get over it. I didn’t think you actually liked me!”

“I always liked you!” There was that hot prickling at the back of her neck. “That’s kind of what I meant when I said I was happy to be stuck in hypertime with just you forever, you know.”

“Well we’ve been here for, I don’t know, two years already. We’ve been in hypertime for two years! When were you going to tell me?”

“Uh, never?”

“Never!” Doreen stared at her. “You were the person who told me that nobody will ever go out with me if I didn’t ask them!”

“Yeah, well, I don’t always practice what I preach, I’m hardly the first person with that problem!”

Doreen glared at Nancy, and then kissed her again, longer and harder this time, until Nancy started trying to drag her towards the sofa.

“Okay, wait, no.” Doreen said, when Nancy flopped down and pulled Doreen on top of her.

“Sure, we can stop.”

“No, I don’t want to stop,” she said, exasperated, and kissed Nancy again. “Just, like… since when?”

“What?”

“Since when did you like me?”

“Uh. A long time.” Nancy avoided her eyes.

“When, though?”

“I don’t know, I felt kind of weird when I was getting you into internet dating, and then Moleman thought I must be in love with you and he said so, and…”

“You mean we could have been doing this years ago instead of waiting until we were the only hypertime travelers on earth?”

“Would you have wanted to, years ago?” Nancy asked. Doreen frowned again, and Nancy caught her hand, kissed her fingers. “You don’t have to answer. It’s okay if you wouldn’t have.”

“I would have come around to the idea.”

“I know. Well, I didn’t know that then,” Nancy said, with a wry twist to her mouth. “I know that now.”

 

 

The next day, Nancy took apart the ray gun again, and for the first time she noticed the memory chip. There was something that had potential. It turned out to be a difficult thing to decode, and she’d have to put in a lot more time on it to get the full picture, but what she could see looked like a record of the moment when the gun hit them.

That could work, in a way. She could probably use that. But the only way she could think to use it right now was to send them back in time instead of slowing time down for them. Erasing everything that had happened since they entered hypertime.

She put the memory chip back in the ray gun, and closed the notebook she’d been using to work out what the chip was doing. Then she put it on the bookshelf, and placed a blank notebook on top of her workbench instead. Yesterday she would have been happy with a going-back-in-time solution. Now, though, she wasn’t so sure about that. Not when hypertime had led her here, to finding out what it was like to kiss Doreen, that it was as good as she’d always dreamed of and that Doreen liked it too.

Today’s experiment had failed, but she wasn’t ready to throw away their memories just to get home, either. Tomorrow she’d start again, and she would try something new.

 

 

Here’s what changed now that Doreen and Nancy were dating: very little.

They got up in the mornings while it was light, because it was always light, though they almost got some shadow for a few weeks when some wispy clouds appeared in the sky. They walked around New York rescuing people, working their way through the grid they’d imposed and noting things down in Doreen’s diary to check back later. They ate Tony’s food and borrowed any other supplies they needed, at least intending to give them back if they ever got the chance. Then, like always, they’d go home to the kind of domestic contentment that Nancy always dreamed of, where she’d work on the machine and Doreen would read books and fetch things for her and sometimes make her tea.

The difference was that they slept in the same beds more nights than not, and they gradually learned every inch of each other’s skin like it was their own, and Nancy’s progress on the machine was getting slower and slower because right now they were very easily distracted by the need to kiss each other at every opportunity. When they were home it was so easy to just give up on mechanics and slouch next to Doreen on the sofa, talking about how the work was going and gradually leaning more and more into her until Nancy was lying completely on top of her, with Doreen’s hands sliding up underneath her shirt, and all other plans forgotten.

The other thing that changed was how they dealt with the fact that their friends had been frozen in their living room for the last six months, and didn’t look like they were going to leave any time soon. This wasn’t a new problem, as they’d been there for quite some time. It wasn’t even the first time it had been awkward, because having some guests frozen in your apartment while you moved around them at hyperspeed was bound to get awkward occasionally. There was not a lot of walking from the bathroom to their bedrooms in just a towel any more, even though they knew they were moving too fast to see it.

It was just that the presence of Koi Boi, Chipmunk Hunk and Brain Drain had gone from slightly awkward to very awkward when they gradually got into these long makeout sessions on the sofa and only remembered there were other people in the room when they were half undressed. And when they had no idea how long they’d have to stay in one place for other people to be able to see them, anyway.

“I don’t think they’d mind,” Doreen grumbled, once, as Nancy was putting her shirt back on with a worried look towards the trio.

“I think they’d mind us being naked. _I_ mind us being naked,” Nancy pointed out. “Look, they’ll probably leave the apartment one day and then we can get naked in the living room all we want.”

Doreen just watched her, uncharacteristically silent, watching Nancy button her shirt back up. Nancy sat back on her heels, still straddling Doreen’s lap, and frowned. “What’s wrong?”

Doreen took a deep breath. “What do you think they’d say? About us?”

“What would our friends say about us being together?” Nancy smiled and leaned down to give her a quick kiss. “They’d say it’s great that we’re together and that this makes us happy. They’d be happy.”

“You think? I mean they seem cool. They’re our friends. I don’t know, I just never even thought much about liking girls before now, so I never told anybody because there was nobody to tell, except I’ve told you and… I just wonder, you know?”

“Yeah, I know.” Nancy cupped Doreen’s jaw and rubbed a thumb over her soft cheek. “Our friends are all good people, though. They won’t be jerks. I wouldn’t have made friends with them if they were jerks.”

Doreen raised an eyebrow. “Because you can always tell when people are going to be jerks?”

“A lot of the time. And if they’re secret jerks then I just stop hanging out with them as soon as I notice.” She paused and looked over at them. “We can write them a note, if you want? Telling them that we’re together?”

“We could, but I’d hate the suspense of having to wait months for them to write back. Besides, it seems like the kind of conversation you want to have in person.”

“Yeah, I think so.” Nancy kissed her again, longer and deeper this time, enough to leave Doreen breathless when she pulled away.

“We should move to the bedroom, then, if we don’t feel like telling them now,” she said, and Nancy was all too happy to follow.

 

 

 

Nancy was, as previously mentioned, quite happy being Normal Nancy, the one without any superpowers. At the same time, she was loving being a superhero of sorts, roaming New York and saving lives. The whole superhero identity, though, was something that she didn’t see much point in if there was nobody around to see it. She would never have agreed to the thing if not for Doreen’s timing.

“You need a superhero name,” Doreeen said.

“Mmm.” Nancy was more interested in licking at Doreen’s collarbone. And other parts of Doreen.

“You could be, uh, speedy… something. Lighting? Ah, ahhhh…”

Nancy let go of Doreen’s nipple and let her catch her breath. “I think Thor would object to that.”

“She should be honoured to… to… aaah…” Nancy had been stroking Doreen’s thighs as she talked, and finally went for her clit, and Doreen couldn’t get another word in.

Nancy thought she’d won that conversation when Doreen came gasping, her clit throbbing under Nancy’s fingers. But then, Nancy was barely thinking about superhero identities any more. This was the best part of sex, she’d decided, the part where she got to see Doreen come, see how intense it was for her and how much she loved it and how Nancy did that, and seeing it was such a turn-on that Nancy was pretty much always grinding down on Doreen’s thigh by this point, desperate to get herself off. So it was also no surprise that she’d agree to anything when Doreen got up on one elbow, pushed Nancy down on her back and quickly had two fingers in her, where she was already hot and wet.

She was already murmuring “yes,” over and over, when Doreen started laying a trail of kisses from her collarbone up the side of her neck, and ended at her ear. She didn’t pause the litany of “yes” even when Doreen whispered “Your name can be Notably Fast Nimble Nancy, with the way your nimble fingers get me off so fast, although we don’t have to tell everyone else that.”

Then she bit down lightly on Nancy’s earlobe, and pressed her fingers in hard, and everything went white.

“So you like it, then,” she said, smugly, as Nancy lay back, panting.

“What?”

“The name. Notably Fast Nimble Nancy.”

Nancy didn’t like it that much, really. She’d gotten used to just being Nancy. But she’d also just come and Doreen looked so pleased with herself and Nancy loved her so much that all she could do was smile helplessly and kiss her over and over again. “Sure, I love it. I love you.”

Nancy had eventually figured out ways to calculate the passage of time. It probably wasn’t a hundred per cent accurate, but she thought she’d done a really good job with it. She didn’t really give a damn how accurate it was when she got to surprise Doreen by telling her when her birthday was every single year.

Still, there were times when it seemed like she must have screwed up, or at least that she was imagining some of it. It seemed just too convenient that Nancy’s knees started to act up just a week after she turned thirty.

“This so unfair,” she grumbled, easing her way down their building’s front steps to the street. The spot just above her kneecap twinged every time she bent it.

Doreen just walked beside her, while Nancy refused to reach out and hold onto her for balance. “I could just carry you down, you know.”

“It’ll be fine once I can walk normally. Oof,” she added, as she took the last step down. She straightened up, took a deep breath, and started walking. “See? Fine. Though I still think this is a ripoff.”

“Yeah, right? I’d sort of forgotten that we were actually getting older, even though you always remember our birthdays.”

“Yeah, I forgot too. At least we’re probably still young enough to heal fast, right?”

“You bet,” Doreen nodded. “When you wake up tomorrow your knee is going to be totally normal again.”

Nancy watched her out of the corner of her eye as they set off for quadrant #1286 to check on a what they’d noted as a suspected burglary a few months ago. Doreen was right, it really hadn’t felt like they were getting older - it just felt like every day was the same kind of timeless happiness together. When she looked closely, though, she could see just a few signs that Doreen wasn’t as young as she used to be. Just a slight change to the shape of her face, the beginning of a wrinkle or two at the corners of her eyes. Easy to forget, but still happening, all the same.

Doreen must have been thinking the same thing, because she suddenly said, “It’s going to be different if we ever manage to get back, isn’t it?”

Nancy laughed. “Yeah, we’re way past the point where we can go back to normal. Can you imagine if we fixed this and went back to college now, with all those youngsters? They’d drive me mad.”

“We wouldn’t fit in. We’re old fogies to a bunch of college students.”

“Plus it’s been so long since I’ve used a phone that I’m not sure I can remember how they work any more.”

“Oh, I’m sure it’ll all come back to you.”

“Still. Maybe we won’t fit in any more, and we’ll be these weird freaks still trying to finish college in our thirties, and our friends won’t want to hang out with us any more…”

“Okay, no. I was kind of with you until that last part, but there’s no way our friends won’t be excited to have us back.”

“Yeah, that was a bit much.” Nancy agreed. “Still, I wonder if we’ve lost something by being here. Some other years of our life. Our youth.”

“Sure, we’ve lost a few years.”

“Eight years is a lot, Doreen.”

“Sure, we’ve lost eight years. But how much of a loss is it, really? We’ve saved so many lives with those eight years.” Doreen turned her head as they walked to kiss Nancy’s cheek. “And look how much we’ve both gained.”

 

 

Nancy and Doreen spent their late thirties and most of their forties living in darkness. They hadn’t been tracking the passage of the sun across the sky, not closely, but Nancy estimated it was a few weeks after her thirty-seventh birthday when they realised that dusk was finally falling. She pointed it out to Doreen as they were strolling through the part one morning, and it made Doreen stop dead in her tracks.

“I didn’t realise,” she said, softly. “What are we going to do when it’s night all the time?”

“Turn the lights on,” Nancy said, immediately.

Doreen reached out and took her hand, and squeezed it, and didn’t let go. She was smiling, but she shook her head, too. “I think it’s going to be a bit harder than that.”

“There are street lights, and a lot of the places we need to go will be well lit. This is New York, the city that never sleeps. I think we’ll do fine.”

“I meant more about, I don’t know, how we’re going to stay cheerful when it’s dark all the time. I know it’s been fifteen years, but I do remember winter.”

“You just don’t like winter because there aren’t so many squirrels about and they all hunker down. And if they come out, they’re always asking you for food.”

“Nancy Whitehead, that’s a dirty lie!” she said, in mock horror. “I would never complain about squirrels asking me for food. No, I just think it’ll be kind of depressing if we have to go years and years without seeing the sunlight.”

Nancy thought about it for a moment as they made their way through the park. It was honestly hard to remember what winter was like after all these years of an endless summer Saturday. It was hard to imagine as they walked through the park, surrounded by green, with only the lengthening of the shadows and the slight tint of the sky to suggest that the sun wouldn’t last forever.

“It might be hard,” she agreed, at last, “But it’s not exactly like winter. It’s still summer here, for one thing, so it’s not like it’s suddenly going to get cold. We’ll stay warm all through the darkness. And hey, maybe we’ll be like the squirrels and finally sleep more, too. I’m looking forward to the excellent effects that night time could have on my sleep patterns.”

“Yeah, I suppose there is that,” Doreen said.

“You still don’t look convinced.”

She sighed. “It’s a long time without sunlight, that’s all. I know some people find it grim enough when it’s only light some of the time. And this has been… this has been such a great time, being here with you and… and falling in love and stuff, and I’ve felt so happy this whole time. I don’t want the bubble to burst.”

Nancy stopped walking and pivoted in front of her. She held Doreen by the shoulders and just looked at her for a moment; the red here that was just slightly starting to fade, and the face that Nancy loved waking up to look at every day. The friendly superhero who seemed to solve just about everything with compassion and friendship.

“Okay. So the night might get depressing sometimes. There’s still no way that’s going to ruin things for us. So you might feel crappy sometimes. I’ll help you through it. That’s what people do when they love each other, right? That’s the whole point. And whatever, it’s summer, the nights will be short. But however long it is, we’ll stick through it together and come out the other side just fine.”

Then Nancy pulled her in close, wrapping Doreen up in her arms, and felt Doreen’s tail wrap around them both, too.

“You really think that after everything we’ve been through, the night is what’s going to beat us down?”

“You seem like you’ve really thought this through,” said Doreen, with some relief.

“Are you kidding? I haven’t thought any of this through. I didn’t plan for us to still be here when it got dark. I really thought I’d have us back to normal time by now. You asked what we should do about it and all I said was ‘we’ll turn on the lights’.”

“Well, you weren’t wrong. We will have to remember to turn them on at some point, and it’ll take hours for them to actually come on. We don’t want to get caught in the dark.”

 

It took another year for the sun to fully set, and like Nancy thought, it wasn’t as cold or as dark as it could be. New York in summer really didn’t sleep. It was harder than it had been before, though. There was something bleak about waking up in darkness every day and finding that it never lifted. Still, they stuck to the routine - wake up, save lives, work on the machine, read some books, go to sleep. Don’t turn the light off before you go to bed, though, because it was usually hours before they’d turn off and then you had to wait to turn it on again in the morning.

Before, when they’d had bad days, they sometimes broke it up by getting out of the city for a while - trains were too slow, but they had all the time they wanted to hike out of New York and off to somewhere else if they wanted to. In the darkness, though, hiking down a highway just made them feel more alone, and a lot more creeped out, even though there was no creepy killer in the world who could take them in daylight or in darkness. So they ‘borrowed’ a sunlamp and huddled together at home, doing their best to keep each others’ spirits up on the bad days.

Nancy wasn’t sure whether it was the darkness or the way her experiments had stalled that really got to her, in the end. It was probably both. She’d been working on getting them for so long without any progress, and it had never bothered her before. But somewhere in the middle of the longest night of their lives, she just gave up.

“You haven’t worked on the machine in a while,” Doreen said one day.

Nancy felt a stab of guilt. “Well, I… I don’t know, it’s just… I’ll get back to it one day.”

“You don’t have to, it’s not like it’s your job,” Doreen said, with a small smile. “I just wondered if I should pitch in and help.”

They were both curled up on the sofa, reading. Nancy was avoiding looking at her pile of books to be read too often, too. There were too many science and engineering books that she’d read cover to cover already to no avail, and she’d just been working her way through a stack of paranormal romances lately instead.

“I don’t know if there’s anything to help,” Nancy said, at last. “I think this might be hopeless, Doreen. I’ve been working on this for more than twenty years now, and I’m still turning up nothing. Absolutely nothing. What kind of scientist am I?”

Doreen put her book down with a wry smile, and pulled Nancy’s hand into the space between them, giving it a gentle squeeze. “For one thing, a lot of those scientists actually finished college.”

“Hey!”

“I don’t mean you’re not working hard! You totally are! I just meant that most people have other people they can talk to. Colleagues. Other scientists. Most people have teachers until they’re well past twenty, as well, but you didn’t have that. You tried to do this all by yourself, because there wasn’t anyone else, and that’s super hard. You’ve done amazingly.”

“It would be more amazing if I had anything to show for it,” Nancy said, with a small smile.

“Not to mention, most scientists don’t spend half their days saving all of New York from peril, either.”

“I don’t think the extra time would have made a difference. EpicCrimez managed to invent the stupid ray gun in the first place, and I don’t think it took him twenty years.”

“I’m also not sure that it works the way he meant it to. How does making us super fast help his evil plan at all? It just made it like a thousand times easier to disarm him.”

“Okay, you’ve got a point there.” Nancy sighed. “I just wish I still believed this is going to work one day. Right now I’m not sure I’ll ever get there.”

“And that sucks, but I don’t think you’re a failure. I think what you’ve done so far is incredible. Just keeping going without anyone else is incredible.”

“I have you.”

“I tried.” She smiled, wryly. “I think we both know I’m not as sharp as you with the machine stuff.”

“I wouldn’t have gotten this far to nowhere without you stealing things from Tony Stark for me.”

“It’s borrowing. And he would have approved.” She let out a long breath. “All I really want to say is, nobody can fault you for how hard you’ve tried. I don’t think many people could keep working on a problem like this for as long as you have without giving up. And like I keep saying, I miss our friends, but I like our life here. So if it’s making you unhappy and you want to give up, that’s okay.”

Nancy was quiet for a while, just thinking, and Doreen eventually patted her hand and went back to reading. Nancy held her own book in her hands, staring at the back cover but not really reading it or taking it in. She was turning this over in her mind, instead. She’d started to feel like a failure. Maybe it was just impossible, though. Maybe nobody could have figured out how to send them back to their old lives. She’d assumed that she could reverse the effect just because EpicCrimez invented the technology in the first place, but maybe that wasn’t how it worked. Maybe some things couldn’t be reversed.

“Thank you,” she said, at last.

“Hmm?” Doreen looked up from her book.

“For what you said,” Nancy explained. “You’re right, I’m not a failure. I’ve been getting too down about not having solved the problem yet, but you’re right. It’s a really hard thing to solve and most people probably couldn’t do it, either.”

“Any time, babe,” Doreen said, with a fond smile. “I don’t think even Tony could do the things he does without a whole team of people to help.”

“I don’t want to give up on it. I still miss our friends and I want to be back there one day. But… maybe I need a break. To forget about the machine for a while. Is that okay?”

Doreen frowned. “Is it okay? Of course it’s okay! You don’t owe it to me to keep working.”

“I don’t want to be the thing that stops you from getting back to normal life.”

“Babe, we’re in our forties now. I’ve spent more than half my life with only you for company. We are well past the point where we could go back to our old lives and act like nothing had happened. I miss our friends, and my family, and I wouldn’t mind going back and everything, but if we ever do get back then we’re going to be super weird.”

Nancy grinned. “And you like our life.”

“Yeah, I like our life.” Doreen grinned back. “And hey, I might like it even more when you’re chilling out with me in the afternoons instead of working on that brain-breaking machine.”

 

Their fiftieth birthdays came and went without much fanfare. Dawn had come again, and everywhere they went was bathed in early morning light. It was nice, seeing dawn for so long after the darkness. A new beginning, somehow, despite the fact that not much else had changed. They still kept to their routine, even though it was starting to feel like they’d read all the best books already, and they weren’t sure how much of New York still needed saving with all the people they’d rescued so far. But the dawn felt like a new beginning, anyway. Like after a lot of thought about how long they’d been there, and how old they’d become, it made them realise how many more sunny days they still had to look forward to.

Nancy still tinkered with the time machine every few months, but she’d stopped worrying about getting it to work. They couldn’t wind back the past, but there was still a lot of time ahead of them. It was only when she found Doreen standing in the living room and glaring at a note from their friends.

“It won’t catch on fire from you glaring at it, you know. No matter how hard you try, you’re still no Cyclops.”

“Our friends are worried that we’re running out of time,” Doreen frowned. “And they’re being rude about it.”

“It’s okay if they call us old,” Nancy said, pressing a kiss to the back of her neck. “We are old.”

“Only to them! Fifty five is not that old. We could keep doing this for decades if we wanted to.”

Nancy stroked her hair, and laughed. “I’m glad you think so, because I plan to keep going. Notably Nimble Nancy isn’t going to rest until every cat in New York is safe from traffic accidents.”

Doreen turned around to hug her around the waist, properly, and then gazed up at her. “Do you ever wonder what else you would have done?”

“You mean if we weren’t here?” She shrugged. “It’s not the life I thought I would have. But I already had a life I never thought I’d have. I didn’t think I’d come to college and meet a superhero.”

“I thought I’d have a daughter, maybe,” Doreen admitted. “Pass on the Squirrel Girl genes to a new generation.”

“That would have been cute. You’d have to do it with someone else though, I guess.”

Doreen turned around, rolling her eyes. “You’d still be her mom, Nancy.”

“Oh. Right,” Nancy really hadn’t thought of that.

Doreen poked her. “Come on, you don’t still think I’d be with anyone but you?”

“You might, if we’d never come here. If we’d never been stuck here together.”

“Nancy Whitehead,” said Doreen, exasperated. “We have been together for nearly forty years without speaking to another human being. There is nobody else on Earth I could love that much. Hardly anyone ever finds a person they love that much. There is no way that we wouldn’t have figured it out, even if we weren’t shoved together like this.”

Nancy stopped then, and kissed her, and then they went to bed and forgot all about the note until Doreen found it again in the morning and got outraged all over again. But something niggled at her memory - the ray gun itself, that she’d put away years ago. A clue that she’d thrown away because it was too drastic, because she wouldn’t throw away the memories she’d made with Doreen for anything. Except now they’d had a whole life together, and maybe going back to the start again didn’t mean losing everything.

If Doreen believed that they’d still have been together, even without being stuck in hypertime, then Nancy believed her. She pulled out the memory chip, the one that had preserved all the data about them from that Saturday morning, thirty years and twenty four hours ago. It would send them back to normal, make them into a pair of twenty-one-year-olds again, and it would probably erase all their memories of their relationship. But maybe that was a risk they could take, if it meant they’d get to fall in love all over again.


End file.
